MetaEfficient

How To Control Your Data Online

by Justin Thomas • August 3, 2012

We’ve become accustomed to online companies hosting our data, but this practice is actually highly inefficient. This page explains the situation pretty simply.

My advice is to use “unhosted” online services that support personal data control, or “zero-knowledge” services that encrypt your data before it leaves your computer. I’ve created a list of suitable services at the end of this article.

Let’s take a look at the problems with hosted data:

Your data can be sold, consolidated and stored indefinitely

If you have accounts on popular websites like Facebook, Google and Flickr — you do not control own your data — you usually have to agree an extensive Terms Of Service, where you give all data rights to the company involved. Often this data is shared, and once your data goes “into the wild” it becomes available for anyone to use or store indefinitely. This is not optimal.

Your account can be deleted or suspended without notice

Most online companies have “Terms of Service” agreements that often include the right for the company to terminate your account at any time without cause. For example, there’s the case of Mirco Wilhelm, whose 4000 linked Flickr photos were deleted when the service accidentally flagged him for copyright infringement. Or read the story of Dylan, whose seven years of Google activity vanished when the system “perceived a violation.”

Your photos, posts and files can be censored

Most online companies have detailed Acceptable Use Policies, that restrict your online activities, often leading to outright censorship. For example, the recent story about Twitter censoring a journalist for criticizing NBC.

Hackers often gain access to hosted data and passwords

Your data can also potentially be hacked. You’ve probably seen numerous incidents of major sites being hacked in news headlines, for example: Linked-In and iCloud.

It’s difficult or impossible to move your data a new service provider

Those are the problems with having a company host your data. However, there is another way.

Listed below is my recipe for making your online life private and unhosted. Many of these steps will require significant effort on your part, to make transitions. Personally, I made these changes slowly over a number of months.

How To Achieve Private, Unhosted Data

For a search engine, use StartPage or DuckDuckGo because they do not track your searches. I like StartPage by Ixquick because they incorporate search results from Google. StartPage removes all identifying information from your query and submits it anonymously to Google. DuckDuckGo is another good search engine with a focus on privacy. Like StartPage, DuckDuckGo and does not record user information — see their privacy policy for the details.

Instead of using Twitter and Facebook, you can use Indenti.ca or Friendica or Movim. These are open-source social networking platforms that allow you to retain control of your data.

There’s really no unhosted version of YouTube, you may wish to use a non-Google alternative like Vimeo. You can share videos privately amongst your friends using a private cloud service like Symform. If you happen to have you own server, you can use Joomla with the HWDTube plugin.

For email, you can a use a browser-based email service like CounterMail, which operates like Gmail, but it provides full email encryption and runs on diskless servers. Countermail costs $60 per year. Lavabit is similar service it doesn’t offer quite as many security features, but Lavabit offers free accounts and their paid accounts are only $8 per year. Alternatively, you can use the open-source Thunderbird with Enigmail and GnuPG, and connect to your mail server using SSL. If you are technically inclined, you can even host your own email server. Zimbra and Sendmail are free and open-source email servers.

CrashPlan is a “set it and forget it” backup application that encrypts your data before it to goes into the cloud. It is also the easiest and most reliable way to back your computer I’ve come across. See my article on backups for more information.

You can switch to the open-source Linux operating system. Both Windows and Mac OS X limit your control when using your computer, and both systems have proprietary code that is not accessible to you. You can read about the problems with Windows, Mac OS X and the iPhone.

I recommend using Mint Linux (KDE Edition) because it’s easy to use and doesn’t require complex installations to get started.

Banshee is a good open-source iTunes alternative. VLC is an excellent open-source video player. XBMC and Plex are excellent media center applications. Libre Office is an open-source alternative to MS Office. GIMP or GIMPShop and Inkscape are good replacements for Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. Serious photographers should also check out the excellent digiKam, for photo management.

Calibre is an e-reader that supports numerous e-book formats. It converts and sends your e-books to your e-reading devices.

On mobile devices, the Firefox OS promises to be the most open operating system. Until then, Android is the your best choice.

A lot of services I mentioned could be improved by using true client-side data hosting. The Unhosted group, is trying to develop “browser-based apps with no server-side backend. Unlike server-side or client-server apps, unhosted web apps leave users in control of their valuable user data and privacy, by default.”